She’s always been careless with the things she keeps.

A pressed violet, its petals half-crushed in the pages of a book she never finished. A rusted locket with no picture inside. A single playing card, the Queen of Spades, tucked into the lining of her coat. She shoves them into drawers, forgets them in pockets, leaves them abandoned in bowls and bedside tables like breadcrumbs leading nowhere. Not hoarding. Not sentimental. Just… existing alongside them, letting them dissolve into the mess of her life without much thought.

I, on the other hand, remember everything.

The first time she left something at my house, it was a ribbon. Nothing special. Cheap satin, fraying at the edges. I found it coiled around the leg of his desk chair, a little black snake, and for days I did nothing but turn it over in my hands, press it between the pages of my notebook.

Now, he has a museum.

Not a shrine. I don’t like that word.

Too desperate, too grotesque.

No, this is something curated, methodical. A glass cabinet in my study, custom-made, its shelves lined with velvet.

The ribbon. A pearl button from the cuff of her blouse. A bloodstained matchbook. A hairpin. The stub of a candle, melted to a twisted.

Tonight, I show her.

She stands before it, fingertips ghosting over the glass. “This is insane,”

I leans against the edge of my desk,“You collect bones,” I murmur, “I collect you.”